Losses Poem by Randall Jarrell
Losses
It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes-- and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)
In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores--
And turned into replacements and woke up
One morning, over England, operational.
It wasn't different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make.)
We read our mail and counted up our missions--
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school--
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, 'Our casualties were low.'
They said, 'Here are the maps'; we burned the cities.
It was not dying --no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: 'Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?'
It is not dying that we fear but the violence in our minds That makes the bombs we drop And keep the war machines in their grind
Woes of war..Dying and not dying..If ruined cities they are witnessing the death due to human folly and rest Susan has described nicely
ONE: It is about the disillusionment and futility of war. It highlights the routine and impersonal nature of death, which is experienced by the pilots "on the wrong page of the almanac" Through its use of understatement and irony, the poem conveys the absurdity and tragedy of war.
THREE: The poem suggests that true losses extend beyond individual lives to innocence, humanity, and meaning. War numbs us to death, rendering it almost meaningless, and normalizes the horrors we perpetrate
TWO: They perish "on the wrong page of the almanac, " scattered across distant mountains or diving into haystacks. These deaths are not heroic or noble; they resemble the passing of aunts, pets, or foreigners.
ONE: This poem goes about the disillusionment and futility of war. Through its understated and ironic tone, the poem highlights the impersonal nature of death experienced by pilots. .
Congratulations being chosen once again in the same calendar year as The Modern Poem Of The Day.5 ***** for this amazing poem about the alienation of war
THREE: lamenting the fact that we are all powerless in the face of our own mortality. This poem is about the profound impact of war and the dehumanizing effect it has on those involved. % Stars absolutely
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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4/23/2024 10:33:22 AM # 1.0.0.1119
One of the great poems about the alienation of war, expressing particularly well the narrator's lack of life experience. He has nothing but high school to compare to the huge, all-encompassing experiences of war. His lack of any life beyond high school before he is sacrificed in the war increases his loss - he has lost all the potential of his life - and he doesn't really understand why he is making this sacrifice. Jarrell is, to me, the great poet of WWII, and a better poet at conveying the existentialism of the warrior than any of the great English WWI poets.